My attention is otherwise occupied, so I won’t take time for a longer post, but I feel this illustrates my point that people just need to blame. It’s a knee-jerk response, and target accuracy is unnecessary, as this demonstrates.
tl;dr – Karen misplaced her headphones in her bag
From an evolutionary perspective, this also highlights theories supporting fitness over truth—fitness beats truth, FBT. Were that a rival stealing hard-earned food, better to apprehend or remediate than gather all the facts only to allow the culprit to escape. Of course, in cases like this, one gets false positives.
I mentioned in my last post about how Artificial Intelligence discovered a new variable—or, as the claim suggests, a new physics. This was a tie-in to the possible missing dimensions of human perception models.
Without delving too deep, the idea is that we can predict activity within dynamic systems. For example, we are all likely at least familiar with Newtonian physics—postulates such as F = ma [Force equals mass times acceleration or d = vt [distance equals velocity times time] and so on. In these cases, there are three variables that appear to capture everything we need to predict one thing given the other two that need to remain constant. Of course, we’d need to employ calculus instead of algebra if these are not constant. A dynamic system may require linear algebra instead.
When scientists represent the world, they tend to use maths. As such, they need to associate variables as proxies for physical properties and interactions in the world. Prominent statistician, George Box reminds us that all models are wrong, but some are useful. He repeated this sentiment many times, instructing us to ‘remember that models are wrong: the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful‘. But no matter how hard we try, a model will never be the real thing. The map cannot become the terrain, no matter how much we might expect it to be. By definition, a model is always an approximation.
All models are wrong but some are useful
George Box
In the Material Idealism post, the embedded video featuring Bernardo Kastrup equated human perception to the instrumentation panels of an aeroplane. Like the purported observer in a brain, the pilot can view the instruments and perform all matters of actions to manipulate the plane, including taking off, navigating through the environment, avoiding obstacles, and then landing. But this instrumentation provides only a representation of what’s ‘really’ outside.
Like mechanisms in the body, instrumentation can be ‘wired’ to trigger all sorts of warnings and alerts, whether breached thresholds or predictions. The brain serves the function of a predictive difference engine. It’s a veritable Bayesian inference calculator. Anil Seth provides an accessible summary in Being You. It relies on the senses to deliver input. Without these sense organs, the brain would be otherwise unaware and blinded from external goings on.
The brain cannot see or hear. It interprets inputs from eyes and ears to do so. Eyes capture light-oriented events, which are transmitted to the brain via optic nerves, and brain functions interpret this information into colour and shape, polarisation and hue, depth and distance, and so on. It also differentiates these data into friend or foe signals, relative beauty, approximate texture, and such. Ears provide a similar function within their scope of perception.
As mentioned, some animals have different sense perception capabilities and limitations, but none of these captures data not also accessible to humans via external mechanisms.
Some humans experience synesthesia, where they interpret certain stimuli differently, perhaps hearing colours or smelling music. We tend to presume that they are the odd ones out, but this assumption does not make it so. Perhaps these people are actually ahead of the rest of us on an evolutionary scale. I suppose time might sort that one out.
But here’s the point. Like the pilot, we can only experience what we are instrumented to experience, as limited to our sense perception and cognition faculties. If there are events not instrumented, it will be as if they don’t exist to the pilot. Can the pilot hear what’s happening outside?
This is the point of the AI experiment referenced above. Humans modelled some dynamic process that was presumed to be ‘good enough’, with the difference written off as an error factor. Artificial Intelligence, not limited to human cognitive biases, found another variable to significantly reduce the error factor.
According to the theory of evolution, humans are fitness machines. Adapt or perish. This is over-indexed on hereditary transmission and reproduction, but we are more vigilant for things that may make us thrive or perish versus aspects irrelevant to survival. Of course, some of these may be benign and ignored now but become maleficent in future. Others may not yet exist in our realm.
In either case, we can’t experience what we can’t perceive. And as Kastrup notes, some things not only evade perception but cannot even be conceived of.
I am not any more privileged than the next person to what these missing factors are nor the ramifications, but I tend to agree that there may be unknown unknowns forever unknowable. I just can’t conceive what and where.
I don’t believe that humans have the agency presumed they have, so I’d like to set out to prove it—at least rhetorically. In the ages-old battle between free will and determinism, I’ve tended to lean toward the determinism camp, but there is something keeping me from gaining full membership. I feel that proving hard determinism may be too hard a nut to crack, so I am aiming at just the agency aspect.
There are two major themes in my thinking.
Humans have no material agency
Power structures require the presumption of agency
Although this concept has been rattling around my brain cage for a while and I still have a ways to go, I feel it will be helpful to sketch out my ideas. I feel inspired by people like Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett. And I feel I can draw insights into counter-arguments from people like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and even Steven Pinker. I feel that my experience in behavioural economics may be useful for additional context—people like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Dan Ariely. But I feel disheartened when it appears that Galen Strawson and his father before him, Peter Strawson, people much more connected and elevated in the field have been treading the same territory for decades — over half a century — ahead of me, thankfully beating a path but not necessarily making much headway. Perhaps I can build upon that foundation if not substantially at least perceptibly. Of course, the seminal work by Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty.
We may act as we will, but we cannot will as we will.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Besides the aforementioned, a correspondent has suggested other source references. He shares: Physics, including quantum mechanics, is fully Lagrangian. According to Stanford’s Leonard Susskind, Lagrange derived his formalism from the principle of ‘Least Action’. Jean Buridan’s principle of ‘Equipoise’ renders a Lagrangian model of the world perfectly deterministic. So, the physical domain is not probabilistic; and all indeterminacy is actually epistemic indeterminability. He also suggets Thomas Hobbes’ “De Corpore”.
About my second point, my corresponent agrees:
I think your “meta” is right. We feel that we are “free agents”, and we don’t know to what to attribute our feeling that we freely choose; so we imagine that we have “free will”. In my view it also doesn’t exist – we really are, as Sapolsky describes, zombie robots – we just don’t (and cannot) know it. Free will is thus a mere (but compelling) illusion on both individual and emergent scales. And yes again: all of morality, jurisprudence, etc., depends on it.
Unattributed Correspondant
My correspondent is a professional philosopher who shall remain anonymous until such time as he agrees, if ever, to make his identity known. I am quiet aware that some of my ideas are contentious and polemic. Not everyone wishes to be mired in controversy.
Humans Have No Material Agency
Humans have little to no agency. This is the point I am making in my Testudineous Agency post. From what I know until now, this likely qualifies as soft determinism, but this might shift as I acquire new nomenclature and taxonomic distinction. I’ve discovered this taxonomy of free will positions, though I am not well enough versed to comment on its accuracy or completeness. For now, it seems like a decent working model to serve as a starting point, but I am fully cognizant of possible Dunning-Kruger factors.
A Taxonomy of Free Will Positions
In essence, hard determinism says that the world is not probabilistic. Some event triggered the universe as we know it, and it will unfold according to the laws of physics whether or not we understand them. A weaker form, soft determinism, allows for some probability and trivial ‘agency’. I feel that Dennett supports soft determinism. I feel that because we, as ‘individuals’, are a confluence of multitudinous factors, we have little agency (interpreted as responsibility). More on this later.
Power structures require the presumption of agency
To be honest, the free will debate is only interesting to me in context. To me the context is power. The ‘meta’ of this is that society (and human ‘nature’) seem to need this accountability and culpability, but it doesn’t actually exist, so it is created as a social construct and enforced in a Foucauldian power relationship through government through jurisprudence mechanisms.
This is the part of the debate I haven’t heard much about. Sapolsky did write in Behave, chapter 20X, that criminal justice systems need to be reformed to account for diminished agency, and I’ll need to return to that to better comprehend his position and assertion.
The rest of the story
As a handy reference, these are the authors and books I’ve encountered to date and in no particular order:
I’ve got a lot of essays and lecture notes not referenced plus general content from Reddit, Medium and other blogs sources, YouTube, podcasts, and so on. I probably should have documented some Classical philosophers, but I don’t generally find their argumentation compelling, though I might add them later.
The aim of this post is just to capture my intent—if it is indeed my intent. Oh, the questions and implications of a lack of agency. Please stand by.
Surfing the Web, I happened upon a blog wherein Wintery Knight riffed on a conversation about morality with an atheist millennial man. My interest was piqued, so I scanned it and then read it. I scanned the About page, and it’s apparent that we hold diametrically opposed worldviews, and that’s OK.
As a result of the encounter with this millennial man, the post intends to answer the question: How could I show him that happy feelings are not a good basis for morality? But let’s step back a bit.
In the words of the author, ‘I asked him to define morality, and he said that morality was feeling good, and helping other people to feel good.’ Here’s the first problem: Although a conversation about morality may have occurred between the author and an atheist millennial man, the post is not in fact a reaction to Millennial morality. Rather, it’s of the respondent’s dim characterisation of what morality is (whether for a theist or an atheist). His reply that morality is ‘feeling good, and helping other people to feel good’ sounds more like hedonism and compassion. The author does pick up on the Utilitarian bent of the response but fails to disconnect this response from the question. The result is a strawman response to one person’s hamfisted rendition of morality. The author provides no additional context for the conversation nor whether an attempt to correct the foundational definition.
A quick Google search yields what should by now be a familiar definition of morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
morality (noun) : principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour
Oxford Languages
Clearly, conflating utility with rightness and wrongness, with goodness and badness, is an obvious dead-end at the start. This said, I could just stop typing. Yet, I’ll continue—at least for a while longer.
At the top of the article is a meme image that reads ‘When I hear someone act like they’re proud of themselves for creating their own moral guidelines and sticking to them’.
Natalie Portman sports an awkward facial expression and a sarcastic clap. Under the image is a line of copy: If you define morality as “whatever I want to do” then you’ll always be “moral”, which is tautological, but a bit of a non-sequitur to the rest, so I’ll leave it alone.
Let’s stop to regard this copy for a few moments but without going too deep. Let’s ignore the loose grammar and the concept of pride. I presume the focus of the author to be on the individually fabricated morals (read: ethical guidelines or rules) and that the fabricator follows through with them.
That this person follows through on their own rules is more impressive than the broken New Year’s resolutions of so many and is a certainly better track record than most people with supposed religious convictions.
New Years’ Resolutions
First, all morals are fabricated—his morals or your morals. And you can believe that these goods came from God or gods or nature or were just always present awaiting humans to embody them, but that doesn’t change the point.
Let’s presume that at least some of his morals don’t comport with the authors because they are borne out of compassion. Since we’ve already established precedence for cherry-picking, allow me to side-step the hedonistic aspects and instead focus on the compassionate aspects. Would this be offensive to the author? Isn’t, in fact, in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, the do unto others Golden Rule edict, is a call for compassion—at least sympathy if not empathy?
After a quick jab at abortion (tl; dr: abortion is bad) taking the scenic route to articulate the point that atheists typically don’t think of unborn children as people, apparently without fully grasping the concept of zygotes and gametes. The author then confuses the neutral notion of a probabilistic outcome with accidents, having negative connotations—as if I flip a coin, the result is an accident. Let’s ignore this passive-aggressive hostility and move on. Let’s also forgive the flippant—or at least facile—articulation of biological evolutionary processes as ‘the strong survive while the weak die’. We can let it slide since what is meant by strong in this context is wide open.
child (noun) : a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority
Oxford Languages
The author continues with a claim that ‘you aren’t going to be able to generate a moral standard that includes compassion for weak unborn children on that scenario’. This feels like an unsubstantiated claim. Is this true? Who knows. Some people have compassion for all sorts of things from puppies to pandas without having some belief in rights. Some people like Peter Singer argues that rights should be extended to all species, and all humans should be vegans. I wonder if the author can live up to this moral high watermark. Maybe so. Probably doesn’t mix linen and wool because it’s the right thing to do.
“If the rule is “let’s do what makes us happy”, and the unborn child can’t voice her opinion, then the selfish grown-ups win.” This is our next stop. This is a true statement, so let’s tease it a bit. Animals are slaughtered and eaten, having no voice. Pet’s are kept captive, having no voice. Trees are felled, having no voice. Land is absconded from vegetation and Animalia—even other humans. Stolen from unborn humans for generations to come. Lots of people have no voice.
People are into countries and time and space. What about the converse situation? Where is the responsibility for having the child who gains a voice and doesn’t want this life? Does it matter that two consenting adults choose to have a child, so it’s OK? Doesn’t the world have enough people? What if two consenting adults choose to rob a bank? I know I don’t have to explicitly make the point that once the child is thrown into this world, the voice is told to shut up if it asks to exit or even tries to exit without permission. Unless circumstances arise to snuff out the little bugger as an adult.
Finally, the author is warmed up and decides to focus first on fatherhood. The question posed was whether the interlocutor thought that fatherlessness harmed children, to which the response was no.
Spoiler alert: The author is toting a lot of baggage on this fatherhood trip. Before we even get to the father, the child, or the family, there is a presumption of a Capitalist, income-based, market economy. Father means the adult male at the head of a nuclear family with a mum (or perhaps a mother; mum may be too informal), likely with 2 kids and half a pet. The child is expected to also participate in this constructed economy—the imagined ‘right’ social arrangement. It goes without saying that I feel this is a bum deal and shit arrangement, but I’ll defer to pieces already and yet to be written here. But if fathers are the cause of this ‘Modern’ society, fuck ’em and the horses they rode in on.
She asks him, if a system of sexual rules based on “me feeling good, and other people around me feeling good”, was likely to protect children. Evidently, he was silent, but here you can already determine that she unnecessarily links sex to procreation. And reflecting on a few paragraphs back, how is forcing a child (without asking) to be born and then told to become a wage slave or perish not violent and cruel?
(Self-guidance: Calm down, man. You can get through this.)
So the question is surreptitiously about procreative sex. By extension, if the couple can’t procreate for whatever myriad reasons, it’s OK? Sounds like it? Premenstrual, menopausal, oral, anal, same-sex coupling is all OK in this book. Perhaps, the author is more open-minded than I am given credit for. Not all humans are fertile, sex with plants and animals won’t result in procreation. A lot of folks would call this author kinky or freaky. Not my cup of tea, but I’m not judging. Besides, I’ve read that book—though shalt not judge. I’m gonna play it safe. And they couldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.
Spoiler Alert: Jesus dies at the end.
Seeking credibility, the author cites Bloomberg, as Centre to Centre-Left organisation as Far-Left. Clearly another red flag. Excuse me, your bias is showing. This piece is likely written for choir preaching, so we’ll take the penalty and move along.
A quick jab at the bête noire of ‘Big Government’ facilitating idle hands and, presumably genitals, to play. The idle rich as Croesus folks are idols to behold. At least I can presume she opposes military spending and armed aggression on the grounds of harm, so we’ve got common ground there. They’re probably an advocate of defunding the police, though by another name. so there’s another common platform. It just goes to show: all you need to do is talk to ameliorate differences. We’re making good headway. Let’s keep up the momentum.
Wait, what? We need to preserve a Western Way? I was shooting for something more Zen. Jesus was a Westerner—being from Bethlehem and all. (That’s in Israel—probably on the Westside.)
White Jesus from the Middle East
No worries. Just a minor setback—a speedbump. It’s just a flesh wound. But we’ve pretty much reached the end. A little banter about some other studies. There’s an impartial citation from the Institute for Family Studies on cohabitation they beg the question and employs circular logic. And another from the non-partisan Heritage Foundation finds that dads who live with their children spend more time with them. How profound. I’d fund that study.
And it’s over. What happened? In the end, all I got out of it is ‘I don’t like it when you make up morals’. You need to adopt the same moral code I’ve adopted.
AJ Ayer – Emotivism
Where was I? Oh yeah. Fathers. So these people don’t mean generic fathers. They mean fathers who subscribe to their worldview. In their magical realm, these fathers are not abusive to their mothers or children; these fathers are not rip-roaring alcoholics; these fathers are the dads you see on the telly.
Suspiciously absent is the plotline where the fathers are ripped from their families through systematic racism and incarcerated as if they didn’t want to be there for their children. And this isn’t discussing whether it’s an issue of fathers or an issue of money. It isn’t discussing whether someone else might serve as a proxy for this role. Indeed, there is nothing magical about fathers unless you live in a fantasy world.
Foucault should be a reminder that the culture wars are not new and post-truth can’t exist because there was never a truth at the start. This is similar to Latour’s question asking if we’ve ever been modern. And the answer remains ‘no’. There is no post-truth as there is no post-modern as each of these is predicated on a fantastical claim. Many humans defend the notion of truth, but they are fighting windmills.
“We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary.”
In these culture wars, each side is fighting for its version of the truth. The truth of rights and freedoms and the correct construct of societies. But there is not one culture war. There are myriad culture wars, and there are few opportunities to be allied across all of these dimensions with another person. For the congruent dimensions, one needs to operate in the mode of the enemy of my enemy is my friend whilst deciding how to ally on other disagreed dimensions later.
But never forget that the wars are intentional. They are a feature of the system of normalisation, not a bug. More importantly, don’t think for a moment that your truth is the truth. The same goes for your adversary.
If anything showcases how nonsensical the concept of justice is, just look at the Rittenhouse trial in the United States. Ultimately, justice is about perception. In a textbook, a bad person does something bad, and a process ritual is performed by judges and juries to divine the otherwise obvious badness, and the bad person is brought to justice. In the extended version, they learn the error of their ways and reintegrate into society and live happily ever after.
In reality, this is all bollox. Good and bad are subjective and contextual. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the charade of justice. In the case of the Rittenhouse trial-slash-debacle, Kyle Rittenhouse shot some people and killed them. Whilst he is being charged with murder, some people view him as a hero—the good man with a gun rather than a vigilante.
Given these perspectives, whether justice is served is a matter of your starting perspective. People in the United States are generally divided on some fundamental political stands, and this predictably colours individual perspectives.
In the Bible, Christians are taught the story of King Solomon, wherein two women each claim a child as their own. Solomon suggests that they cut the child in half and by doing so, he reveals the true mother by judging their responses.
Spoiler Alert: I am only pretty sure that Solomon wouldn’t have followed through on his twisted joke.
This Bible story is part of the Western legal canon and teaches the impartiality of judges and some practical wisdom, but then we remember that it’s just a story.
Returning to Rittenhouse, irrespective of whether justice ends up being served is basically a coin toss. If you have been following the proceedings, you’ll notice that the pack is being stacked in his favour and the dice are weighted and the coin is biased.
Personally, I think the guy is an ass-hat. I feel that anyone who carries a weapon has anger and compensation issues. And if he wasn’t there in the first place, none of this would have unfolded as it did. I am a conscientious objector and believe this is precisely why the Second Amendment of the US Constitution relates to a well-regulated militia and not some pizza-faced wanker.
If he is judged not guilty, people like me will viscerally feel that justice is a sham. Obviously, I already maintain that opinion, but other people still believe in justice and Santa Claus. If he is judged guilty and gets a suitable sentence—another subjective constituent of justice—, then the other cohort feels that justice was not served.
One could argue, as Christians do, that God is the final arbiter of justice. Someone has to be, right? It also reminds us not to judge—probably because we’re not very good at it—, so there’s that, too.
I hold my original stance: justice is just another vapid weasel word.
I’ve been following Philosophy Tube since Abigail was Ollie. Always top-notch material. Their content has gotten longer over time, so I’ve found myself skipping over in favour of shorter presentations. I am so glad to have decided to watch this one.
As anyone who follows me knows, I am a big advocate of social construct theory, yet I learned so much in this vid, which is proper well-cited AF. Lot’s of new content to add to my backlog, so I’ve got more than enough reading material for my next few incarnations at least.
The biggest takeaway for me is the notion that not only is gender a social construct, but so is sex itself. Previously, I have defended the sex-gender distinction, but in fact, scientific taxonomies are still social constructs—only in the scientific community rather than the greater community at large.
Abigail’s platypus drives home the point. Not that it’s some big reveal. Another less poignient analogy is fruit and vegetable classification. Tomatoes are fruits. Mellons—watermellons, pumpkins, and so on—are fruits. Say it ain’t so.
Give it a viewing and like or comment here and/or there.
Here I am yet again writing about something I am not particularly equiped to do. In other fora, I’ve been directed again to Lacan vis-à-vis a thread about Lacan’s perspective on the real. I’ve commented on Lacan before, usually in the context of eschewing any philosophy founded on psychology—especially psychoanalysis. Explaining that I have a reading backlog extending beyond my likely lifespan, it was recommended that I read Jacques Lacan by Sean Homer, so I am sharing the recommendation. Anything by Bruce Fink was another reco. Noam Chomsky takes an ad hominem swipe at Lacan here.
I decided to watch a few videos (including this, this, and this) to survey some of Lacan’s ideas, knowing that something could be lost in the translation. Let’s just say that I was underwhelmed.
In a nutshell, my biggest contention is the notion of the unconscious as an active agent.
According to my understanding, Lacan posits that there is a ‘real’ out there, but it is obscured by language and subject to interpretation. To him the real is a Void.
Psychoanalysis presumes being able to get closer to the ‘truth’ of reality. Like astrologers and fortune-tellers, Psychoanalyst primary defence is that not all knowledge is evidence-based or falsifyable. My problem is that I am not open to another way of experiencing the world, but they somehow have privileged access to this truth. Of course, this is a similar to religious claims of some special spiritual access that opens when you believe.
To me, the Void is as apt a metaphor as any. And while we both agree that the real is inaccessible, I don’t accept the impostition of the how and the why. What Lacan does—and Freud before him and psychoanalysts more generally—is to inject hows and whys into the story. In this narrative, the unconscious has active powers, (as opposed to negative space), where memories (in whatever form) may be repressed and actions may be triggered (or activated) by unconscious urges or desires. I consider this last train of thought wholly imagined and fabricated. This void and the unconscious has no purpose.
Along the way, I do agree with Lacan’s poststructuralist position. I have no issues with symbolic or metaphoric concepts and speech. The contention arrises when one attempts to claim the metaphoric to be concrete. This is the same contention I have with people who take the metaphoric text of the bible and cencretise it. There are other problems there, but I’ll quit now.
In bygone days, national governments asserted power and prevailed over relgion, in essence forming a ceasefire partnership that has, save in pockets, pretty much held fast in most of the Western world. Religion is still somewhat of a factor in many corners — in some circles dominant —, but the latest challenger are the acquisitive corporate defenders: multinational (wannabe supernational) entities, whose aspirations of dominance is stifled by the prevailing power structure.
As many in government are Capitialist converts, they each and collectively have an Achilles heel, as captured by the adage probably misattributed to Lenin, ‘The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them’.
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.
not Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Contemporary politics see the orgy of strange bedfellows and the slow poisoning of Democracy by lobbyists and their palliative care of the deligates of the People. Some of the polis see this and react in horror to decisions such as Citizens United in the United States, as more and more foxes are voted into the hen house — and wolves into Congress. This is not limited to the United States.
Along the way, some government officials attempt to cozy up to the predators to enriched themselves personally at the expense of their citizenry and on the way to the killing floor. They’ll have been fattened by scraps, only to be consumed in the abbatoir. In some cases — perhaps many — the leaders are themselves part of this acquisitive class, so they are not in particular need of a country.
Even if the acquisatives are aware that they’re destroying the host and the structure that invented them, these petulent progeny run roughshod anyway. But the permissive parents don’t wish to bite the hands that feed them.
So far, the acquisitive corporatists have been able to snuggle up with the ruling class, and this class perceives themselves as being part of this class. Most aren’t. They are entourage at best — pathetic sycophantic hanger-ons. Once they realise that they are not members of the club and try to wrest control, the real fight will commence, but it will likely be too little and too late. The real losers will be the people, no longer having evern the semplence of protection. Libertarians will finally see that their dream was a nightmare from the start.
And then we await the next paradigm shift.
Backstory
What prompted this post?
A colleague on Facebook posted a Scientific American article about oversimplification of sex determination in response to a transphobe, and Facebook took it down. Having had a couple similar responses myself, I have come to the conclusion that Facebook and the other social media giants need external governance. I don’t want to endure what ass hats like Donald Trump have to say any more than the next person, but this censorship needs to happen in a different way. Given my perspective on Truth, we need to assess how best to keep devisive speech in control. In some cases, these people are simply lying. They claim that I didn’t say that, wasn’t with that person, wasn’t in that place, and so on when these are all demonstrably false. This is not generally illegal behaviour.
When Trumps says, I’ll be president again in August, or I’ll be Speaker of the House, this is a prediction. It’s like saying, ‘This is the winning lottery ticket’. Language allows for this speculative hyperbole. Again, bad form and taste are not illegal. Even if some assclown riles up some portion of the populace, who’s to say whatever they’re hawking isn’t for some future greater good at the expense of some near-term disruption.
I’m rambling. The point is that the overreach of Facebook is just another instance of corporations taking power into their own hands and uncontested. It will come to a head. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but mark my words.
We’re all familiar with the scenario: a representative from law enforcement appears at a door and flashes a badge or an ID. It’s in most of the police movies. A gaggle of people in official-looking uniforms. One of them pulls out a warrant, and they make their way into the residence. You still with me?
Here’s the rub? How does one know with any degree of certainty higher than blind faith?
Do you know what an ‘official’ badge or ID looks like? How do you know it’s not counterfeit?
Do you even know what a search warrant looks like? It’s signed, do you know the person it’s signed by? Perhaps it’s a judge. Is the warrant real or fake? What about the uniforms or official-looking vehicles?
Indoctrination and cognitive dissonance are key factors
The answer is most people would have no idea. Indoctrination and cognitive dissonance are key factors. In movies, apart from the documentation, there’s the intimidation factor. And maybe guns for full effect.
To be sure, people have performed variations of this script, and they’ve been punked. So, the question remains: How can one tell? And when does when get to call bullshit?
And what are the down sides? If these cats are legit, and after the bullying and indignity, you’ll probably be facing accusations of obstruction or resisting. Of course, you’ll be justified, but justification is asymmetrical and out of your favour. The house holds the advantage, and you aren’t the house.
But let’s pretend that justice is symmetrical and does have meaning beyond its application as a power tool, how far would one need to go to be sure?
Take the case of the warrant signed by a judge. S/he shows up in person and says, ‘Yup. I signed that warrant’. Has that gotten you anywhere? Probably not. You don’t know this person, and you have no way of evaluating the authenticity of the claim. Does it take the governor? The president? The head of the UN?
And even if you trust the entire process thus far, what say do you have in justifying the merit of issuance of the warrant?
Philosophics 