DFHippie

That's an evergreen template.

It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.

(well, the Russian Federation, not the USSR)

I don't understand why the people manipulated with lies aren't offended at the liars. They are primed to believe the lies, but aren't they mad that someone sought to manipulate them?

This keeps happening because it works. But why does it work? Why isn't there blowback?

The world is turning to crap right now because of affinity fraud.

"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"

People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.

And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.

> And Americans voted for this! Twice!

For many Americans, three times!

And for many Americans, never.

Also, bear in mind that the first time he won he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. We have a voting system that favors less populous states. In 2024 he won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. He has never been very popular in this country. But his party controls all branches of government and he controls his party.

It turns out electing a stupid, vengeful narcissist and liar who is at death's door is not the way to go.

Europe is getting the same firehose of stupid propaganda and is looking a little shaky. Education and history give Europe an advantage but not immunity. There are stupid people everywhere eager to get their hate on.

Sometimes it's touching a hot stove. Sometimes it's putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger to see if it's loaded.

Most Americans agree with you at this point.

They don't want you messing with their poles/conduits because they don't want you accidentally electrocuting their linemen with shoddy work. There are abusive regulations. I just don't think it's so simple.

Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.

This is not the experience on the ground in Vermont.

Most likely because you have a) buried power lines and b) less exposure to destructive storms.

> Politicians' only job is to get elected.

Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.

Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.

That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.

How can we date the origin of speech?